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15 thoughts on “Making Dreams Matter”

Dear Dan,
People from different walks of life have ignited my passion. They initiated a spark in me. I could internally connect myself and could see my hidden potential. I have ignited fire. This fire keeps on increasing and it becomes torch for others. Others means those connected with me get inspired and start searching fire in them.
I appreciate your idea of talking about dreams. We should talk about others dream And I think talking itself create initiation and spark. Dream is just a dream unless it is acted upon. I do believe that dream exists for the brave and courageous people. Such people make them dream real and actually live their dream. But those who only see dreams and do not make effort to materialize, keep on dreaming. So, dream provide direction and determination provide strength to make it true.

Laurie, I too have done this. I believe that as leaders, we want so badly to see those around us succeed that we try use our experience to save them from failure. When you have the privilege to mentor someone, remembering that failure is a part of the success process can be a hard pill to swallow. A very successful mentor of mine helped me out with these words, “don’t worry about a problem that you don’t have.”

I love all your posts, but this is one of your best in my humble opinion.

My favorite is “avoid limits.” Sometimes people on your team will have talents of which you are unaware. Let me give you an example. I’m a career teacher, but I also love to write and speak. When I started to submit articles to national teacher magazines it made one of my school administrators very nervous. He told me I had to get all my articles approved by the school district’s PR department before I submitted them. The national magazines liked my writing and ideas so they would sometimes call me with a last minute idea. I didn’t have time for preapproval. I finally just started ignoring the preapproval step. The result? The district received quite a bit of positive exposure as a result of my writing. The articles always included a blurb about where I worked, the books I had authored etc. Paranoia can block unexpected opportunties.

This district also had a rule that a teacher could only attend one national teacher conference because of getting time off school and such. Once you went to one, you weren’t apt to be allowed to go for about 10 years. But I like to speak at conferences. Once I got lucky and the national conference came to my own city. I put in two speech proposals and spoke on Saturday and Sunday. My whole speaking career grew from that one weekend. Soon the national organization was calling the district and asking for me to speak.

The reputation of your business may grow in unanticipated ways if you will avoid limits.

Your ‘pull, don’t push’ resonated here Dan. If you are pushing, it probably is your dream or a variation of your dream superimposed on theirs. Respect their dream and have them draw you along with them.

One of the most powerful igniters is belief. Believing in someone, in their dream, in their capacity to grow and verbalizing it–can fan those flames.

One step that leaders can take to help keep the dreams alive is to remove or minimize potential barriers, even mundane ones that you know will crop up. Ex: If the dreamer has a training or conference to attend that also adds value to the organization, ensure that the paperwork gets through the circuit and/or find the funding.

Very good topic put into a few words; from my experience though and being a passionate communicator and leader, I find it very hard at times to ignite people as many of them don’t see the big picutre. Many of them are too concentrated on the day-to-day activities so that it becomes hard to even see small dreams take off. More visionaries are needed, courageous people who stand up and do things differently! Jenny

Dan, I could speak on the subject of dreams for hours, as I’m sure you could too. I believe society no longer conditions people to dream; in a culture where a “don’t get your hopes up” mentality is the mainstay, people are literally conditioned to believe that they’re not allowed to be the exception. So many individuals have no idea that they were made for greatness because from birth, nobody has told them; they have no idea that you are in life as a result of how you think. Coming across a blog like this gives me hope that there are more leaders in this fight than I suspected.